It’s National Grandparents Day 2023, a Hallmark-type holiday to collectively celebrate and honor our grandparents. I never met my paternal grandparents as they both passed away when my father was in his teens, but I’ve written at least a half-dozen posts reflecting on my maternal grandmother, Minnie Goddard. I suppose I’ll eventually run out of anecdotes about “Nanny” as I fondly called her, but I still have a few more up my sleeve.
I actually planned this post for Grandparents Day 2022, but due to Queen Elizabeth’s passing a few days earlier, instead I focused on the topic of tea, a beverage Queen Lizzy and Nanny both enjoyed.
As most of you know, I have no siblings and no family members. Through the years, Mom used to tell me about visiting HER grandparents, 60 miles away, always on holidays and every Summer. Mom said she was close to her grandmother. Here she is with her grandparents. I assume the first picture was taken at some type of celebration judging from the corsage and dress clothes (her cousin Ted is to the right).
This photo was taken at her grandparents’ farm.
Mom was devastated when her grandmother passed away in 1953. Her opinion of her grandfather was that he was a cantankerous old man, an opinion I shared about my own grandfather, including in this forum.
Mom would recount how on hot Summer nights, the entire family would cool off by sitting on the wraparound porch. Here is a photo of Mom on that porch.
When the Ariss homestead was to be sold after her grandfather’s passing, Mom asked for two items from her grandmother’s kitchen, a blue cake plate and a teapot. These vintage items have been part of my country kitchen’s décor for decades.
Nature’s bounty.
Each Summer when friends/fellow bloggers Diane and Ruth are posting pictures of the bounty of fruits and veggies from their respective gardens, it pulls at my heartstrings a little. The tasty rewards from their efforts remind me of my mom’s tales about her family’s annual August trip to her grandparents’ farm to help bring in the crops, harvest the fruits and veggies and “put up” the abundance of nature’s goodness for the long Winter ahead.
Likewise, when I got lost on a country road enroute to the sunflower festival a few years ago, I passed many driveways with makeshift produce stands. They reminded me of Mom’s stories about farm life circa 1930s – 1950s, plus triggered nice memories of my own family’s Sunday drives to country farm stands to buy tomatoes, new potatoes, green beans and ripe, juicy peaches for cobbler. Once home, we didn’t bother with the “B” or the “L” as we’d just have the “T” … sliced tomatoes on buttered toast. If I close my eyes I can picture Mom enjoying a juicy beefsteak tomato over the kitchen sink to catch the drips, the tomato in one hand, salt shaker in the other.
So many nice memories revolve around food and family don’t they?
You say “to-may-to” and I say “to-mah-to” … some just say “yum”.
MY grandparents were NOT a match made in Heaven. I’m surprised he cracked a smile in this photo. Nanny was without a smile however.
I truly believe the only thing my grandparents ever collaborated on was the annual ritual of making chow chow, a tasty tomato relish which I’d describe as a thick salsa. (Okay … well maybe they collaborated as to my mom, Pauline and her younger brother Ronny too.)
As to anything else, my grandparents fought like cats and dogs.
I never heard my grandfather call Nanny an endearment, let alone by her given name, Wilhemina, nor her nickname “Minnie” and instead he muttered and mumbled constantly, or grunted in response to anything she said to him, often cursing back at her. But then, she never called him “Omer” – instead she referred to him as “the Old Man” (he was 14 years older than her). They were a perfect example of how opposites attract – she was kind and gentle …
… while he was a miserable old coot.
But together they made quite the team as they turned out enough jars of green and red tomato chow chow to fill the shelves of their fruit cellar until the following Summer.
Those bushel baskets of green and red tomatoes, plus a lot of onions, came from Ariss, the “souvenirs” from their annual sojourn to the farm. They didn’t “put up” anything else to my knowledge and likely there was no recipe as Nanny learned the art of making chow chow from years of helping her mom.
Nanny was not a good cook, (just like me), except for her Sunday pot roast. If you were a visitor to the house, she’d fix you a ham sandwich and a cup of tea the minute you walked in the door (without asking you first), whereas my grandfather immediately went into the living room to watch wrestling or the hockey game, or he’d go and sit outside depending on the season. My grandfather made dinner every day but Sunday. Mom said she never knew if this was because Nanny’s cooking was so bad, or he got home from work earlier.
My grandparents were not fickle about this pickly treat.
When the pair collaborated on making green and red tomato chow chow, my grandfather would sit in the basement peeling and chopping onions, a matchstick with the sulfur part in the corner of his mouth to thwart the strong fumes and keep his eyes from watering. (At least that matchstick kept him from his usual foul mouth and outbursts that accompanied his ever-present sullen demeanor.)
After filling a big bowl with diced onions, he dutifully took them upstairs to join the tomatoes and spices which would then simmer in a huge pot on the kitchen stove. After endless hours, maybe even days, of this collaborative effort, the wooden shelves in the fruit cellar were lined with green and red tomato chow chow, which the family slathered on eggs, meat, ham sandwiches, or simply spread on toast. This ritual lasted for decades until my grandfather’s death in 1969.
When I was young and we visited my grandparents, Nanny would send me down the creaky wooden basement stairs to the fruit cellar to retrieve a few bottles to eat then and/or take home. Not only did I fear falling through the steps, I was afraid of spiders and the light from a solitary light bulb did not calm my fears in the least.
Stirring up the memory pot (in more ways than one).
So how did this become an annual ritual? My great-grandparents, Andrew and Catherine Klein, had a farm in rural Ariss, a community near Guelph, Ontario. Nanny had eight siblings – there were three girls and six boys. One by one the boys grew up and married, settled in the area and farmed, like their father. The boys remained close to one another and led similar lives, but Nanny and one of her sisters moved to the big city, a/k/a Toronto, to escape the farm wife/farm life existence. Toronto was the hubbub of manufacturing, jobs were plentiful and the sisters got factory jobs right away and each eventually married, but always returned to Ariss for every holiday gathering.
Through the years Mom would be wistful about those long-ago, huge family gatherings at the Ariss homestead, even though the Summer get-together involved hard work and could hardly be defined as a vacation. For example, my grandfather had two weeks off from Gutta Percha & Rubber Manufacturing Company, a plant which made tires, hoses and rubber boots. My grandmother had an equal amount of time off from Planter’s Peanuts or Rowntree’s Chocolates, two factory jobs she held when my mom was growing up. During those two weeks spent in Ariss, they were immersed in a round-robin helping venture, from the elders to the rest of the extended family. My grandfather helped harvest the crops and bale the hay, while my grandmother joined her mother in the hot farmhouse kitchen.
I understand my grandmother had berry bushes everywhere, so there were lots of berries to pick for preserves, pies and cakes. Sometimes a cousin or two would run over from another farm to visit and they were relegated to berry-picking chores. The kids were dispatched with big buckets and told not to come back to the house until their bucket was filled to the brim. Being out in the hot sun and toting that heavy bucket might have made it tough being a farm kid back then in the early 1930s, but the cousins made it into a game and challenged each other to see who could pick the most berries. Mom’s favorite pie was red currant and for years, every Summer Mom and I would scour the local farm markets for a couple of pints of red currants so she could relive her youth and enjoy this tart and tasty pie once again. Mom would tell me the farmhouse screen door didn’t do a stellar job of keeping the flies outside and her grandmother would be swatting at flies sitting on a coffeecake in the back kitchen while asking her granddaughter “is that a fly or a currant Pauline – my eyes are bad?”
With the berry picking done, the cousins moved on to collecting tomatoes, still warm from the sun …
… then similarly toting them into the house so those tomatoes would eventually be turned into chow chow.
My mom never did any of the annual canning rituals like her grandmother and mother, but she always loved this tomato-y treat. Whenever we went to a fruit and veggie stand while out on a Sunday drive in the country, she’d always be scanning their offerings for a similar product.
One time I went to pick up some holiday goodies for Christmas at a local Honey Baked Ham store and saw they had red tomato relish. I brought home a couple of bottles which were gone almost immediately as Mom declared they tasted just like what she remembered, so I bought her a case for her Valentine’s Day birthday and tomato chow chow became a regular staple in this house until the store stopped carrying it.
If you’re wondering why you never heard of tomato chow chow, Google confirms it is a Canadian treat, (though not as famous as poutine). 🙂
Here is a recipe for it (click here).
Ceramic decorative tomatoes are more my style as you see in this kitchen countertop picture.
Family faces are magic mirrors. Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present and future. ~ Gail Lumet Buckley
Happy Grandparents Day if it applies to you.
[Photos are my own except for the chow chow pics and tomato meme obtained from Pinterest.]
Linda Schaub
WALKIN', WRITIN', WIT & WHIMSY 
I enjoyed reading about your family and seeing the photos. Lovely!
As to names, I’m very familiar with chow chow. Today was the first time I laid eyes on poutine. The spell checker knew it!
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Thank you Anne – I really enjoyed writing that post … I had it ready last year, only to be usurped by Queen Elizabeth’s passing, thus I did the tea post. It was fun to include my great grandparents whom I doubt I’ve mentioned before so the first time their pics have been in this blog. Those are the only photos I have of them. I’m glad you know chow chow – I included the screen shot by Google as I thought people would think it was a “created word” … poutine is that popular that the spell checker knows it – now that is funny. I hope to try it one day, though if I’m having a gravy indulgence, I’d do sausage gravy and biscuits. I do know that my grocery store carries Wisconsin cheese curds now … probably people requested it to make poutine!
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This is very interesting. I am sorry you seem to have no link with cousins anymore.
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Thank you Anne … I was already to post it last year for Grandparents Day and when Queen Elizabeth passed away, I switched to a tea post. I am also Canadian, though I’ve lived here since 1966. Chow chow was a big thing in our family for years. I have no family at all – thank goodness for photos to help keep memories alive. My mother and her brother were estranged for years so the only time I saw him was at both grandparents’ funerals and my grandmother’s 80th birthday party, just a small get together, just a few months before she passed away. His kids were not at either funeral, nor the birthday party, nor was his wife.
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A wonderful collection of pictures and memories, Linda. All the tomato stories made me think of the tomatoes my father used to grow in his garden, and how amazingly delicious they were. I could never bear to buy a tomato in a grocery store after growing up knowing how great they taste straight from the garden. I can relate to your mother when she declared the chow chow tasted just like what she remembered. I feel the same way when I find a good tomato at a farmers market. 🙂
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It was a fun post to write Barbara. I know you told me you are going to the farmer’s market where you live now, so I suspect you are scooping up those nice tomatoes, maybe even the heirloom tomatoes that some of the bigger produce markets have now. You are right about the store-bought tomatoes – no matter the season, they are usually hard and tasteless. That chow chow was good … boy was my mom happy when I discovered such a similar product at Honey Baked Ham.
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I had no idea today was Grandparents Day! Appropriately, we are going to watch 3 of our grandsons play soccer this afternoon.
I enjoyed reading about your family’s farm history. As you know, we live in a farming community. We have chow chow here, too, but it’s not tomato chow chow. It’s pickled beans (green, lima, and navy), corn, cauliflower, carrots, celery, sweet peppers…really whatever you have in your garden. Tomato chow chow sounds delicious!
My grandmom loves tomatoes too. When I was little, we used to have corn on the cob, green beans, and sliced tomatoes for dinner sometimes. I loved that dinner!
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Hi Laurie – Grandparents Day is always the first Sunday after Labor Day and I remember when it began (now 44 years ago, according to Google), I sent my grandmother a card, assuming they celebrated that holiday in Canada, but they did not. Three grandsons playing soccer … I know they can’t all be on the same team age-wise, or can they?
Your chow chow sounds delicious too. There used to be a corn relish that was mass marketed – maybe “Aunt Nellies” and we used to buy that sometimes. When we went to produce stands in the country, then later when our City opened their weekly Farmer’s Market, we would go and get corn on the cob, green beans and tomatoes and also my mom loved those new potatoes that were small, you scrub them and boil them and eat them with the skins on. She’d enjoy a plate of those with lots of butter – not healthy, but tasty. I went once with my parents to visit a great-uncle’s farm. He gave me a pet rabbit which I named Scratch. I wish we could have gone more, but that was it.
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All 3 boys are on the same team. The age range is from 4th – 7th grade.
I love those new potatoes with plenty of butter too. In fact, I just got some from a nearby farmstand last week. Like you said – not heathy, but delicious!
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Well that makes it a lot easier to go watch them then – that’s for sure. My former boss had a teenage son and triplet girls, also teenagers, while I worked for him. Each of them was into a different sport and his wife was busy with Girl Scouts and they were Girl Scouts so Ed used to say that all he and his wife did was take the kids to events and it wore them out. I remember the boy was into hockey and had ice time practice at 5:00 a.m.
My mom used to say the new potatoes are only available a short time each year, so she’d enjoy them and cut back later … you are running off that butter!
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When I was young, my mom did a lot of canning. We had a garden and a lot of fruit trees in our yard. When I started working, I bought her a freezer to freeze some of the veggies like corn.
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My mom never canned but she did used to buy, then stew a lot of rhubarb and strawberries together to make a sauce for over ice cream but that was about it. We had neighbors many years ago with plum and peach trees. They were elderly, so my father and I would rake leaves, shovel snow for them and they would tell us to pick whatever we wanted … we’d have a lot of cobblers, kuchens and crisps when in season. That was nice of you to buy the freezer. I am sure your mom appreciated that – nothing like having fresh corn on the cob in the dead of Winter.
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You have some nice memories of your grandparents and your mother to cherish, Linda. It is interesting how some of our treasured objects are holding places for our memories.
I only have memories of my grandmother, her sister, and my great grandmother and her sister; all of which are no longer living as well as my mother. I don’t know anything about all other members of my family in those generations. And my birth father thought I fondly remember him was removed from my life when I was six when my mother remarried. No one during my life really spoke much about anyone else and no one was allowed to speak of my birth father.
I suppose because we lived in different states from my grandmother visiting was a very short time and were living in the present moment grasping as much time we had with each other. None of them lived on a farm. They lived in the suburbs of very large cities.
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Thank you TD – yes I do have nice memories and a lot of photos to look at to remind me of those people. I have a few more anecdotes to share about my grandmother down the line. She did have a lot of neighbors and friends who thought a lot of her and confided in her … things they didn’t share with their own loved ones, but would tell her. I have written about my grandfather here in the past and there was not much love lost when he died. He once called me stupid because I was learning French and didn’t pronounce words like he did (he was from Quebec) and we studied Parisian French in school. I slid down off the chair and bit him and caught some flack for doing that – a spanking, grounded … I was not very old, maybe 5-6 and learning French was mandatory in Canada where I grew up.
We are kind of in the same boat as we were estranged from other people while growing up. My mother and her brother were estranged for many years … it had something to do with my father, but he never visited while we were at my grandparent’ home and I only saw him, but no other members of his family, like my cousins or his wife, at my grandparents’ funerals and my grandmother’s 80th birthday party. There was not much love lost there either.
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I never felt or thought of myself estranged from my birth father or another of the others in those generations, Linda.
I do know what it is to be estranged and the feelings of estrangement as I am estranged from my oldest brother and sister-in-law in today’s times. Estrangement is very sad for me.
As far as my birth father it was not a matter of estrangement or abandonment as you have felt, Linda. I do know that my birth father spent his entire life until his death when I was 31 trying to find me and my siblings. I have a confidential letter sent to me from the social security administration from his sister, my aunt, about specifics. Unfortunately, he passed away and I didn’t know how to connect with my aunt, his sister. She has also passed away.
So not quite the same boat. Although you and I do have a lot of similarities in our lives that I think we both can relate. I know that you did not know that about my birth father. I don’t share this with very many people because it is so different that people usually cannot comprehend it in its entirety.
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By the way… I am French! But I can not speak the language.
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I took French for many years, first for five years from kindergarten through Grade Five while living in Canada where it was mandatory as a second language and for three or four years while in college. I had two semesters of French in college where we spoke no English in the classroom, but sadly, not using a foreign language on an everyday basis, it is easy to forget how to speak it. I would love to study French again – it is a beautifully spoken language, although I was not able to trill my “Rs” so I never sounded too authentic.
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Correction. I must correct what I said about my brother and sister-in-law. I’m not estranged from either of them either. It’s more of a difference of direction of our lives. Sorry that I have not been able to convey properly on a blog moment. Estrangement is not at all the appropriate word.
I truly do understand your story Linda that you felt your father left you and your mother, abandoning both of you.
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You got me wondering Linda If I have ever heard of “Chow Chow”? Can’t say If I ever have?
I have heard of poutine however. I guess we never did any sort of canning.
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You might not have heard of it as your family didn’t do any kind of canning and likely if my grandmother didn’t grow up on a farm, she would not have either. I was surprised that Anne (Mehrling) said she had heard of it – she grew up in the South. I’ve heard of poutine but never tasted it, but now we can buy cheese curds in the grocery store to make our very own poutine if we wanted to rather than go a restaurant for it.
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I enjoyed reading about your grandparents. Makes me wonder what my grandkids will say about me some day. 🙂 My grandmother also canned tomato relish. I can still smell the delicious smell. We ate it on fresh beans and peas from the garden. I have only once found a tomato relish that even remotely tasted like hers but have never been able to find it again. The art of canning faded out with my Mom’s generation in our family.
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Rebecca, I am glad you liked this post and it brought back some nice memories for you of your grandmother and her tomato relish. I am sure you don’t have to worry what your grandkids will say about you one day. My grandfather (and my great-grandfather from what I understand as I was young when he died) were not nice men who treated their wives terribly. My great-grandmother raised nine kids and helped out in the fields and when she was hooking up the wagon to go to church on Sunday, the horse reared up and came down on her foot, smashing it. My great-grandfather looked at it and said “you’re no use to me now with that foot.” She never walked properly after that. My mom used to get Aunt Nellie’s Corn Relish, which was not the same, but did remind her of the chow chow.
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Happy Grandparents Day!
Lovely, interested & historical memories you share your grandparents & your mother. Wonderful you family photos. Delicious tomatoes recipe . Amazing your grandparents farmhouse kitchen. Beautiful grandmother’s kitchen, a blue cake plate and a teapot. These vintage items have been part of your country kitchen’s décor for decades. So pretty & good B/W all photos. So good look your grandparents pics.
Thanks Linda I enjoyed reading about your family and seeing the photos. Lovely!
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Thank you Raj, I am glad you enjoyed a little peek into my past, even though much of this post happened before I was on the scene. I do have a lot of photos and slowly I am introducing many of them into my blog … these vintage photos are in pretty good condition considering their age.
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Thanks, Linda. I am so happy. I Always waiting your New post. & amazing photography. Your Every enjoyable & made my day. 💯💕
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Thank you for saying that Raj. I am glad you are enjoying the posts as much as I enjoy putting them together.
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Thank you so much, Linda!
Kindness your reply. Really true.❣️
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It must be nice to think back on family memories, those family photos were nice to see. I never met either of my grandfathers, though I share a birthday with my maternal grandfather.
I’ve never heard of chow chow, but it does sound good. I love the idea of growing, picking and canning my own veg. Maybe one day when we finally get more time to do something with the garden we can try it.
Thanks for sharing these memories with us. 🙂
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Thank you Ari – glad you enjoyed this post. It is always nice to go through these old photographs and relive memories. One of the best things I ever did was to digitize all my photographs, though it took me the four-day Thanksgiving weekend of 2017 to do that. Some are still raw images that need to be tweaked as I go along because some albums were oversized and pages could not be removed from the album to scan them properly. I wish I had bought a handheld scanner instead. The name of this treat was a little odd, but the chow chow was tasty. I’d like to be able to grow and can my own produce too, but the rabbits, squirrels and birds in my backyard, would help themselves first. It is time consuming as well and you know how precious spare time is. I hope you enjoyed your recent time off and got to relax a little.
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I still need to digitalise a number of my old photos and I’d love to go back to my family home and digitalise the photos from my childhood.
It’s one of those tasks that does need a lot of time dedicated to it.
Thanks, I did get quite a nice time off – even managed to do a treasure hunt around Belfast for a day 🙂
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Yes, it is a big undertaking Ari and I would suggest using a hand scanner if you do this project, especially if old photos are in large albums with pages that can’t be removed from the album. It will be so much easier. I eventually want to assemble all the photos like an online photo album, but that will be a while until I have time to do that. My mom took a lot of baby photos and other photos with a Baby Brownie camera and those black-and-white photos are a very small size.
I’m glad you enjoyed your time off – the treasure hunt in Belfast sounds fun.
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Thanks Linda, yes the Treasure hunt was a lot of fun (and a lot of walking!)
I wanted to sort photos as I have a digital photo frame and wanted to get it set up. But the photo project always feels so daunting.
Maybe it’s a good December project, when the weather is cold and we are staying indoors more.
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You’re right Ari – a Wintertime project sounds good (although I make Wintertime stay-at-home projects, then often don’t get them done). A fellow American blogger has one of those digital frames and she wrote a post about it since her daughter lives in Denmark and is able to add new digital photos to her mom’s digital frame and/or edit the frame as well.
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I envy you the cake plate and teapot, Linda. What I would give for just one piece of my mother’s day-to-day china; perhaps one of the plates on which I ate countless meals. I’m sorry to read about your grandfather’s demeanor. Both of mine were gentle souls, with quick wits and wonderful laughs. I can recall my paternal grandfather getting into disagreements with my grandmother, but certainly nothing to bring the house down. The photos of your grandmother make me realize I never saw my own grandmothers in anything but a dress, whether at church or the kitchen sink. You’re also fortunate to have several photos of your great-grandparents, as I can only picture one or two from my own. I enjoyed this personal post and would say it made the “holiday” less Hallmark-y 🙂
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I am glad you enjoyed this post Dave. It is nice to stir the memory pot every so often, especially when it is food related, as so many memories come from meals shared with family and loved ones over the years. I also have a tiny angel figurine and a small teacup and saucer that belonged to my great-grandmother. They are bone china and fragile, so they are high up in a corner of the kitchen cupboard so they don’t get broken. I should have thought to take them down for a picture. The maternal side of my family was much gentler souls and I’d like to think I continued that trend. The paternal side was more on the “grumpy old men” category – that’s for sure. I never saw my grandmother in anything but a dress either .. she always wore an apron over her dress in the house and dressed up for St. Helen’s Catholic Church at the end of her street every Sunday.
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I love your grandmother stories. But I really love the things you have of her’s. Most of my stuff from the old farm neither of my brothers want and they will probably get thrown away because I don’t trust the auction people to have a clue. I have a milkglass plate much like your blue one except it’s white. I think I have a teapot, used to have a tea cup and saucer and salt and pepper shaker, I think they’re gone. And now I’m considering adding a copper coffee pot to your box, if you like. I’ve got a couple other plates but they are on too high a shelf for me to check their backs right now.
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Thank you Zazzy – I’m happy you like my grandmother stories. Next year will be a funny one about worms. That will make you smile. I know my mom was happy to get the plate and tea pot to remember her grandmother by. The teapot has some places on the enamel which must have burned the color away from the gas flames. Both are very old now as my great-grandmother passed away in 1953. I have a small angel and teacup and saucer, also very small, that came from her house. I should have thought to include them with these photos; they are tucked away in a corner of the kitchen cabinets where I have to climb up on the ladder to reach them – we put them there for safekeeping. That is very nice of you to include a copper pot in the box … I would appreciate it if it not too heavy to ship – thank you for asking. On the top of the cabinets, purely for decoration, is our old copper teakettle. It is quite small and my mom used it for her tea for years, until it got a small hole. It fits into the country decor too.
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I noticed Grandparents Day marked on my calendar but it’s not something that we have regularly celebrated. I did begin a post about my grandmother but didn’t have time to finish. I do plan on finishing it though.
I enjoyed reading about your family.
I’m done with tomatoes for the year and even gave some to my neighbor and my sister because I had done all that I wanted to do. We still have apples coming in so I have apple sauce and pie filling to do yet.
My husband likes to eat fresh tomato sandwiches with mayo but I prefer the B and L with mine. 🙂
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They didn’t have Grandparents Day in Canada, so when I sent a card the first year, my grandmother didn’t know what to make of it. I think this holiday is like Sweetest Day – not everyone knows about the holiday – it is not heavily advertised. I’m glad you enjoyed reading about those good old days on the farm and especially the canning part as well. There is an apple tree that is in the Park and it has a lot of apples, but no one takes care of the tree, nor picks the apples, so the squirrels help themselves to them. But those squirrels do the same as they did the one and only year we had tomatoes … they take one, take one bite and throw it on the ground! The B and L tastes might good on those “mater” sandwiches too!
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Linda, thanks for sharing your memory of your grandparents their famous tomato chow chow. I have never heard of it and had no idea that you could eat it with various dishes. Growing up Korean, we didn’t eat many dishes with tomatoes in them; we mostly ate fermented vegetables, roots, and asian veggies.
Reading about your grandparents’ relationship reminded me about my paternal grandparents and how dysfunctional their relationship was. I wonder how quality of life would’ve been different for them if they were less argumentative with each other. I appreciate you sharing their story and giving us a glimpse of your memories surrounding farms, family relationships, gathering, and picking berries and tomatoes!
BTW, for some weird reason, I was not following you. I thought I followed you since the day we met, but today the “follow” button showed up. I’m following you again on WP and email subscribed. Isn’t that weird?! Also, thank you for telling fellow blogger TD about my blog. She’s so sweet and a big admirer of Dart. She told me you had told her about my blog. Thank you for a wonderful connection!
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I am glad I am not the only person with dysfunctional family members Esther – whew! I have had that happen where suddenly I am not following someone and others have said “I’m not getting your posts.” It’s noticeable for bloggers who post on the same days (well I usually do except holidays I do different days). There are a lot of weird things with WP sometimes. I hope it works out for you. Now as to TD, she was following my blog and commenting, then couldn’t comment and it also happened with my friend Ann Marie, so she told me about it and then I had to e-mail her the blog post link so she could post comments. But I think WP corrected that as TD and Ann Marie can comment now. I am glad TD is able to follow and comment … you are welcome! You and I connected through Yvette and the Thoreau quote.
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Oh my gosh…I believe every family has varying degrees of dysfunction! It’s not an easy topic to approach in writing but you did a great job with it, tying in memories, images, recipes, and peppering in the story of your grandparents into that tapestry.
Yes, we made the connection through Yvette! I’m so glad we did and have hit it off right away. Thank you for connecting me to TD too.
Have a great start to a new week!
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Thank you Esther – well, I think every family has their skeletons in the closet so I thought I’d weave those in amongst the memories, images and recipes. 🙂 I thought it was Yvette after she sent me a post you had that same day from Thoreau (hope I’m right about that). Yes we did hit it off right away! You are welcome for TD too!
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You did a great job with it!
Yes, Yvette was our connection and meeting you has made my blogging journey rewarding!! I mean it. 🙂
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Thank you Esther! Yes, I have enjoyed our friendship as well as being Aunt Linda to the kids as well. 🙂
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Totally!! Same sentiments.
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Green and red tomato chow chow! I haven’t thought about that condiment in years. I never liked it, but I know it was/is considered delicious by the people who do like it. Your photos and family stories are the best. Thanks for sharing them here.
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Ally, although I ate green and red tomato chow chow in my younger days, like you, it’s not something I’d buy for myself now. My mom really loved pickles and when we visited my grandmother, she would stock up on a brand of bread-and-butter pickles that had pickled cauliflower. I’ve never been a pickle kid for some reason.
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Aw, Linda, such lovely and lively memories you shared. I’m glad to read of the fond memories you have of Nanny. I think that you have a bit of her ability to persevere when it comes to not-so-jovial folks we end up dealing with in life. The treasures you’ve kept in place in your kitchen and the photos you shared are so special. I’m touched by your post – well done!
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Thank you Shelley – I appreciate that compliment and I am glad you liked my fond memories of Nanny. She would set her mind to something and do it … she and my mom were very much alike. Those are the only photos I had of my grandparents and their farm but I do have several photos of my grandparents, my grandmother especially. I do have a small angel cherub and a small teacup and saucer which I should have included too – maybe another time for another post … they are really vintage looking.
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You’re welcome. I find it heartwarming that you’ve saved such treasures and that you share them with us. It’s nice you know who the people are in the photos. I have some that my mom saved that I don’t know who they are.
Those vintage items deserve to be shared with us!! 😉 I bet when you do some fall cleaning and sorting you’ll find more treasures to write about too! 🤔😉🥰
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One day I will see if I can photograph those vintage items in the cupboard, the little angel who is actually inside the teacup for safekeeping. My mom used to wash them every year when we did the insides of the cupboards (until I protested that we don’t use these dishes and glassware, so we’ll wash them when we use them) … she would just shake her head at me. 🙂 I do have one shoe box of photos which I totally forgot about when I scanned in all the albums at Thanksgiving weekend 2022. It was a massive project that took four days to finish and I still have to tweak a lot of those photos as they were very tiny from Mom’s Baby Brownie, or I couldn’t scan them well on the flatbed scanner so I will have to crop the one side of many of them. Anyway, I have a box of odds and ends photos that never ended up in the photo album and in that box I believe are pics taken at Christmas when I used to decorate to the hilt. I took the pics really so I knew how we positioned everything in the three rooms that were decorated … it’s a small house so I had to maximize every available space.
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Sounds like you’ve got plenty of wonderful blog ideas to spare if you can’t get out and walk this winter. 🤔😉😁
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You are right Shelley, plus there are holiday posts, a blogiversary post … I should be okay if the weather gets ugly. No snow yet thankfully and we are getting 80 degrees at the end of this week (10 degrees above normal) – SMH.
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And critters too! 😏🤔
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Yes, lots of critters – in the Winter, there will be more squirrel posts as they freeze their butts off in the cold and snow.
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I can almost see you photo editing them with little sweaters and stocking caps on! 🤔😂
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Yes, that’s a fun idea!
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Every kid should grow up with a strong bond to at least one grandparent. I know I did, and still treasure those memories.
Thanks for sharing these great moments from your youth.
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I agree JP. We both were lucky in that respect. I was close to my grandmother. It’s been 37 years since she passed away. Glad you liked my golden memories.
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